NSW: Injections begin to prevent school hepatitis A outbreak

AAP General News (Australia)
08-23-2006
NSW: Injections begin to prevent school hepatitis A outbreak

By Katelyn John

SYDNEY, Aug 23 AAP - Health chiefs will investigate a Sydney school tuckshop as a program
to inject 300 students to guard against an outbreak of hepatitis A began today.

More than 100 students and 15 adults at St Patrick's College, a private Catholic school
in Strathfield, were given immunoglobulin antibody injections at a temporary clinic.

The clinic will open again tomorrow as part of the measures to protect 300 students
believed to have eaten from the tuckshop on the day a hepatitis A-infected volunteer helped
prepare food.

NSW Health communicable diseases director Jeremy McAnulty played down the threat of
a hepatitis outbreak at the school, but said the department would investigate work practices
at its tuckshop.

"There are guidelines already about hygiene in terms of food preparation ...

"I can't comment specifically about this circumstance, but we've identified a risk
here," he said.

Dr McAnulty said that because the risk was detected within the first two weeks of the
students' potential exposure, an outbreak should be preventable.

"It's impossible to give a figure on exactly what the risk is," Dr McAnulty said.

"We hope that the risk is low ... but the idea of the intervention today and tomorrow
is to reduce that risk to basically negligible."

Dr McAnulty said students, with their parents' permission, could take the treatment
which should "stop that infection dead".

Unlike hepatitis B and C, once the treatment was given, the infection should not recur,
he told reporters at the school.

Even if students did contract the disease, there would be no long-term effects, he said.

"(With) hepatitis A people will get it and then get over it and get no long-term effects
from it," Dr McAnulty said.

Other workers in the tuckshop would also be offered the preventative treatment.

Hepatitis A is a virus that causes liver inflammation.

The main symptoms develop two to six weeks after infection, and include fever, feeling
unwell, poor appetite and abdominal discomfort.

A few days later people develop jaundice and dark urine.

However, not all people who are infected develop symptoms.

The disease is usually transmitted when the virus from an infected person is swallowed
by another person through eating food that has been handled by that person or through
direct contact with that person.

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KEYWORD: HEPATITIS

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